It started with a collapsed roof. Michèle and Julio had been looking at the property for three years before they finally made an offer — partly because of the land, mostly because of the stone. The kind of stone that takes centuries to settle into itself.
The masía had been abandoned since the 1980s. Two of the six rooms were open to the sky. The olive grove had gone wild in the way that only decades of neglect can achieve — chaotic but somehow still productive. On the day they first walked the land together, Michèle counted fourteen different varieties of wildflower growing through the cracks in the courtyard wall.
What followed was twelve years of restoration that never once mistook beauty for comfort, or authenticity for inconvenience. The kitchen came first — because a kitchen tells you what a place believes. Theirs is large, open, with a central table that seats twelve and a wood-burning range that was installed before anything else.
We didn't want it to look restored. We wanted it to look like it had never stopped being lived in.
The east courtyard at Mas Margot, early morning.
A house that remembers
Every room at Mas Margot contains at least one object that was found on the property. A carved wooden door frame, salvaged from the collapsed section and reused as a headboard. A rusted iron key, large enough to be a weapon, hung near the entrance not as decoration but as fact. The stone floor in the main hall was relaid using the original tiles, cleaned by hand over the course of three winters.
Michèle and Julio are not precious about any of it. Guests are encouraged to use everything — to cook in the kitchen, to sit in the good chairs, to take a book from the shelf and leave one behind. The house is not a museum. It is an argument, made in stone and wood and silence, for a particular way of being.
Stay here
Ready to stay at Mas Margot?
€280/night
The best places are the ones that make you feel like you arrived somewhere real.
We visited in February, which is not the obvious season. The mornings were cold and clear. The light came in low and long across the olive grove, the kind of light that photographers wait months for. Breakfast was unhurried. Dinner, when Michèle cooked, lasted four hours and ended with a walk around the property by torchlight.